Monday, September 26, 2016

I am writing
this piece from my hotel room close to St. Anne’s College, Oxford, where I am
attending the eleventh Association of Adaptation Studies conference. I have been energized by the papers I’ve
heard so far, and pay tribute to the speakers for their diligence in writing.

On the other
hand, while reflecting on the event last night, I was reminded of Noël Coward’s
mischievous wartime song “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans.” A satirical song condemning British appeasers
during the lead-up to the outbreak of the conflict, it was a good example of
Coward being thoroughly mischievous.
Following his lead, I wondered whether I might not take the opportunity
to be a little mischievous myself and call for a temporary moratorium on
literature and film studies within the adaptation studies umbrella. I realize that this suggestion might cause
consternation among some colleagues (my late lamented friend James Welsh would
have reacted apoplectically), but there might be some potential advantages.

First, we might
escape from what might be termed the tyranny of the text. Pieces might focus less on detailed analyses
of similarities and/or differences between source and target texts and concentrate
on more suggestive issues – for example, how texts are reworked and reinvented
across time and space. Second, we would
escape – at least temporarily – from those old chestnuts of fidelity and
suitability – i.e. what renders a text ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ Such values are a movable feast at the best
of times.

Thirdly, a
turning away from lit-and-film might pave the way for approaches drawn from
other disciplines, thereby transforming adaptation studies into a genuinely
transdisciplinary form. I have written
several times in previous blogs about the value of accommodating the work of
cognitive psychologists such as Jerome Bruner, D. W. Winnicott and Jean Piaget,
and do not propose to rehearse old arguments, except to point out that our
capacity for narrative-making is a highly suggestive concept, especially while
responding to cinematic and televisual narratives.

Some work has
already been done on ethnographic approaches to audience behaviour within
adaptation studies, and more so within fan studies, where the work of Matt
Hills tells us a lot about the way we consume fan texts. Perhaps our focus could expand somewhat into
the work of neurologists such as Jeffrey M. Zacks, whose recent book on cinema
audience behaviour offers some penetrating views on how our brains respond to
film, especially in terms of adaptation.
Zacks’s all-accommodating view of the brain contrasts with that of John
R. Searle, whose theory of perception, published last year by Oxford, offers a
rather pessimistic view of our adaptational capacities, especially among those
who spend ‘too long’ watching films (a fascinating claim).

Working on the
relationship between history and adaptation offers further possibilities for
considering the potential of narrative construction. We can not only go back to some of the great historiographers
such as Jacob Burckhardt and (more recently) E. H. Carr, but we can also engage
with contemporary debates as to the value of ‘history’ and whether it differs
in any way, shape or form from others forms of narrative such as ‘fiction.’ This mode of analysis meshes in with
anthropology insofar as we can try to understand how we make sense of
narratives, and whether our brains are conditioned to accept past information
or whether we process it into the formation of new and suggestive narratives.

There is also
the form of analysis called mesearch.
This is a particularly self-centred form of practice, concentrating
specifically on the relationship between the personal and other forms of narrative
construction. Critics might dismiss this
approach as potentially narcissistic, but it allows writers to take a major
engagement in the production of their material.
Storytelling becomes a major form of academic discourse, while the
boundaries between the ‘personal’ and the ‘academic’ no longer seem to have any
real validity. Mesearch can have a therapeutic
function, even though some colleagues might not want to disclose so much about
their lives. This is fine; I am only
offering it as a potential academic path for adaptation.

I realize that
there might be constraints placed on colleagues – for example, the need to
publish articles in prestigious journals that might not welcome such approaches
– but I do believe that, with perseverance, we can expand our fields of
inquiry. So, I call for a temporary
moratorium on literature and film, while being aware that it will not happen.

Monday, September 12, 2016

In
2011-12 I had cause to review Simone Murray’s important work of adaptation
studies The Adaptation Industrythat adopted a materialist perspective by suggesting that industry
concerns often played far more significance in the way source-texts were
transformed into target texts in the major media.[i] While authors, directors, and other creative
workers had their parts to play, their concerns seemed less significant than
the desire for effective marketing and publicity. I reviewed the book twice, once in a short
note for amazon.com, which was largely positive,[ii]
and slightly less favorably in a review now available on academia.edu where I
suggested that Murray needed to be less essentialist in her approach and
acknowledge the vital contributions to the adaptive act of all individuals,
both in front of and behind the camera.[iii]

It’s remarkable how one’s
views can change over time. Two nights
ago I settled down to watch Two Tickets
to Broadway, an anodyne Howard Hughes musical from 1951 designed to
showcase the studio’s nascent talents, including singer Tony Martin, actors
Janet Leigh and Gloria DeHaven, and dancer Ann Miller. The film was essentially story-less, being
nothing more than a series of specialty turns performing in front of the
camera, including Bob Crosby (Bing’s lesser-known sibling) with a cardboard
cutout of his brother.[iv]

Nonetheless director James
V. Kern had created something of a framework for the film, as the three college
kids (Leigh, DeHaven, and Miller) traveled from their small town in Middle
America by Greyhound for the bright lights of New York, firmly convinced in
their own minds that they had the talent to succeed in the bigtime. The plot, endlessly recycled in Hollywood
movies since the days of Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney, suggests that
individual talent will always win out despite the odds; if you have the drive
and the energy to succeed.

Once they arrived in the Big
Apple, however, they found their dreams thwarted at every opportunity by a
series of card-sharping agents, executives and other media types, who wanted
them simply to conform to particular stereotypes that they knew would work with
audiences. Hence Miller could not show
off her dancing skills, but rather try to combine classical with modern dance
in an awkward manner. The other two
women were reduced to chorus members trying to pretend they were enjoying
themselves performing in front of the microphone, when really they wanted to
branch out on their own.

None of this might seem
especially noteworthy, but it made me stop and reflect critically on what I had
previously thought about Murray’s work.
Although a firm believer in the potential of individual talent to change
the world around us, as well as ourselves, perhaps we are constrained in many
ways by the pressures of capitalism and success. I had recently encountered an article in the Guardian Weekly about the banking
industry since the Lehman Brothers collapse, and was shocked to find how much
of a culture of fear persists wherein “employment […] is a purely transactional
affair.” One worker was quoted as
saying: “When you can be out of the door in five minutes, your horizon becomes
five minutes.”[v] Times might be very different now as opposed
to sixty-five years ago, but the sense of precariousness remains; unless
individuals are prepared to conform to dominant industrial norms, irrespective
of their vocation, their futures are shaky.
It’s called the Logic of the Market.

Yet I still retain a naïve
belief in the power of individuals to negotiate that system – not by
“subverting” or “changing” it, but by finding ways to cope with it. Two
Tickets to Broadway retains a certain charm, as it shows how female bonding
manages to charm the hearts of even the most hard-hearted Broadway types and
managing to achieve success against the odds.
The film suggests the importance of looking into oneself and realizing
that there is an emotional core of one’s being that no one can touch, so long
as you can try to find it. This is not
just “self-belief” in the entrepreneurial sense, but has a lot to do with
discovering an ontological core at one’s center. This is what really gives us the potential to
adapt ourselves to different situations.

In theoretical terms, what
we have here are two cross-currents working in totally opposite
directions. As members of capitalist
societies, we have to respect the up-and-down trajectory of business, with
“success” at the top and “failure” at the bottom; when we fall, we are thrown
on the emotional and professional scrapheap.
Yet if we look into ourselves and find that joy (there is no other word
for it) that can keep us going, we might discover that life can be endlessly
fulfilling, with myriad possibilities for continual adaptation running
side-to-side in all directions, impossible to control.

The cross-currents involving
these two modes of life lies at the heart of any adaptive act, I believe. Working through them is an endless source of
intellectual as well as emotional fascination.

Sunday, September 11, 2016

I
began Amy Spangler’s newly-published translation of Sevgi Soysal’s Yenişehir’de Bir Öğle Vakti (Noontime in Yenişehir) (1976)[i]
today. A vivid recollection of Ankara in
the Seventies, it brought to mind places and emotions that have been part of my
adult life for decades now: the small businesses, the rhythms of daily life and
the need to survive against sometimes difficult odds.

As
I read on, however, I became aware of a peculiar
sensation that made rethink much of what I believed about translation in the
past. Despite Spangler’s fluid and
extremely readable rendering of Sosyal’s text, I felt the translator lacked an
instinctive grasp of the complex social, cultural and familial negotiations
that dominated the city then and continue to now. She did not broach the complex networks of
honor, duty, the need to provide and social responsibility that permeate the
small business person’s life. The need
to please customers is accompanied by what might appear as an antediluvian
respect for feminine passivity: women need to be looked after, whether they are
at home or on daily shopping. Hence the
employment of rituals of customer service which to westerners might seem
cloying or over-intrusive.

Capitalist interests are
part and parcel of the shopkeepers’ raison
d’être, but they also have a loyalty to one another that is publicly
displayed. Only today while grocery
shopping I saw some of the staff embracing one another before asking whether
they needed any help in making pre-holiday purchases, or anything else. This is part of the desire to ensure that
their close friends are not cheated in any way.
Such overt displays of affection are inevitably treated suspiciously by
less passionate westerners, who ask – often entirely superfluously – “what’s in
it for the seller?” We have to add
another layer of complexity to this structure: sometimes westerners expect as
of right that they should be helped by a local, especially while in positions
of power. Help is freely given with no
questions asked or expected if you need it.

Spangler’s translation could
neither communicate the complexities of the homemaker as she browses from shop
to shop looking for the best for her family dinner. This ritual is entirely different to the
helter-skelter dash to the supermarket and back for frozen dinners. It comprises a complex interplay of social
and conversational thrusts and parries, where the homemaker talks to the
shopkeeper and asks for the best on offer.
Naturally the keeper might want to extend the truth, but their desire
for profit is tempered by the knowledge that the homemaker only wants the best
for her family on a limited budget. This
knowledge leads to a civilized negotiation based on give and take, both
participants secure in the knowledge that no sale might occur. Even if it doesn’t, the respect between the
two remains undimmed.

Noontime in Yenişehir does not know where to begin in recreating a landscape where each
district old and new has stories to tell – of longstanding communities who
moved in when the Republic was established, who have lived cheek-by-jowl for
generations, and who respond to the inexorable progress of change both through
adaptation as well as appealing to the past, as manifested in social and/or
marital rituals – for example, desiring to protect all family members from
harm. We might term such moves ‘traditionalist’
or, more abusively, ‘ostrich-like,’ but Soysal has a lot to tell us about the
power of the past as a living entity and source of strength affecting all of
our lives.

Ankara has changed
immeasurably since Soysal’s day, but that ineffable quality persists in Kızılay. The big government-owned department stores
might have departed now, replaced by concrete shopping centers, but the covered
markets (çarşılar) remain, their
networks of small shops offering the quirky, the different and the
beautiful. Families still run them; the
owners sit communally outside, while their spouses move from adjacent street to
adjacent street in search of the best deals.
Youngsters gather in Kızılay’s tree-lined boulevards to chat, drink
lemonade, or eat lunch at the Ankara University restaurant, just as their
immediate ancestors did in the past. The
atmosphere is redolent with the ghosts of those who took to the streets in days
of yore –not necessarily to protest, but to express that ineffable air of
belonging to an ancient city. The
inexpressible past is mediated through the present, even if no one says so: why
should they? To them it is part and
parcel of their upbringing, their souls, and their beings.

So where does that leave the
translator? For the first time in my
too-long career as an academic, I understood her limitations. Spangler might be highly proficient in both
languages but she can never empathize with Soysal’s haunting prose. There is an ontological core of personality
remaining closed to her. I cannot claim
to any superior knowledge in this respect, as my Turkish is not good enough,
but I can taste the text underneath as I read the translation and use that
experience to reflect on my life as a domiciled Ankaran. I am forced to turn in on myself and consider
what “translation” denotes; is it an expression of inadequacy as well as a
facilitating process; or is it a complex mode of enlightenment that prompts
often inexpressible speculation on my state of being? In a recent Guardian article, Jonathan Freedland likens this state of mind to
that of religion, a feeling that “cannot be explained or justified in the
clear, stainless-steel language of pure reason.”[ii] I think we can think beyond that binary of
reason/ unreason into a more profound mode of being in the moment, where
nothing else – not least worldly thoughts of explication – really matters.

Insofar as Spangler’s work
forced me to sit up and reconsider Ankara past and present, it was a highly
suggestive text. But I am skeptical that
it will achieve the publisher’s purpose of rendering the source-text accessible
to emotionally ring-fenced westerners.

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

This is not a blog-post per se but a full blown piece. It is one that I truly believe in at this point, which is why I want to share it. I recorded the talk also on https://soundcloud.com/laurence-raw/history-adaptation-and-freedom-2016

Let me say
in advance that this piece represents a personal recollection of my encounters
with historical adaptation over the years, based on my engagements with the
topic ever since I co-edited the collection Adapting
History with Defne Ersin Tutan in 2013.
My apologies, therefore, in advance, if people have heard some of it
before. In 2005 I published an article
on the ways in which T. E. Lawrence had been represented in David Lean’s famous
epic (1962), as well as Lütfi Ö. Akad’s Yeşilçam
work İngiliz Kemal Lavrens’e Karşı (İngiliz Kemal versus Lawrence)
(1952). The article shows how Lean
rehearses familiar stereotypes of “the terrible Turk” by means of Jose Ferrer’s
performance as the Turkish Bey, especially in the torture sequence where he
presides over Lawrence’s (Peter O’Toole’s) humiliation. Lean contrasts that representation with a
largely attractive portrait of Lawrence working in cahoots with Omar Sharif’s
Sherif Ali. Akad reverses this
opposition by recasting Lawrence (Muzaffer Tema) as a black-haired,
smooth-talking villain contrasted with the hero İngiliz Kemal (Ayhan Işık)
based on a real-life spy who worked during the Turkish War of Independence
(1919-22), Ahmet Esat Tomruk, who infiltrated Allied garrisons and passed on
military secrets to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s liberationist forces (Raw
257). My conclusions were recently
challenged by Sinan Akıllı, whose meticulous analysis of British government
documents, coupled with a closer look at the Lean film suggest a more favorable
interpretation: Lawrence was not especially prejudiced against the Turks as he
understood that Atatürk was a potential ally of King Feisal (played by Alec
Guinness in the Lean film), and hence inclined to support the Arab cause. By contrast İngiliz Kemal Lavrens’e Karşı’s one-sided portrayal of Lawrence
might have been moderated slightly if his own account of his adventures, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1922), had been
published at the time of the film’s release.[1] However carefully Lean portrays Lawrence in
the film (and I am not sure I agree with Akıllı, as I will discuss later), it
is evident that both film versions are predicated on binary oppositions – east
vs. west, Ottomans vs. Allies, indifference vs. colonialism – that shut down
rather than encourage cross-cultural analysis.
The need for mutual understanding seems more imperative now than it
might have done half a century ago, when Lawrence
of Arabia was released in theaters in the months leading up to the Cuba
Missile Crisis. Akbar Ahmed has recently
observed that few Americans, especially those in the corridors of power, really
understand how Muslim societies work: “The consequences for Americans were […]
hundreds of thousands of American lives lost [during the “War on Terror”],
fundamental values and human rights compromised at home and abroad, the global
image battered, and entire nations thrown into upheaval” (368-9). The best means to resolve conflict is through
negotiation, a cause not helped by the release (or re-release) of historical
epics such as Lawrence or Kubrick’s Spartacus (1960), described by Ahmed as
potentially disastrous in the way it “saw the periphery as uncivilized and
primitive; [while] the periphery viewed the center as corrupt and effete”
(328). The latest remake of Ben Hur establishes a similar opposition
between the good Christians and the uncivilized Romans and their tendency
towards barbarism.

While it
might be unrealistic for mainstream filmmakers to change a profitable formula –
especially for the blockbuster – perhaps there are possibilities to rethink the
processes of adapting and responding to the past as represented onscreen. We need to deconstruct the notion of binary
oppositions, a way of thinking that has become well-entrenched that we fail to
acknowledge its ideological roots, as witnessed in Edmund Wilson’s claim (made
as long ago as 1940) that history concerns living people who are rational,
creative, and striving after beauty and order (197), or in Bernard Lewis’s more
recent assertion that westerners cannot understand the Islamic preoccupation
with God and eternity (230). The process
of adapting history and considering its effect on the individual psyche depends
on vagueness – a willingness to set aside preconception and approach a text on
its own terms as a retelling of the past designed to make us reflect on
ourselves and our relationship to that past.
In making such decisions, I argue that we also have to set aside the
claims made by genre theory; while this move might seem contentious (the
purpose of most interventions on the subject consists of an attempt to make
sense of often disparate material), I believe that genre produces unwarranted
expectations; if a given text fails to meet them, then it loses its perceived
value as an object of our attention. I
will try to illustrate this point by referring to recent work in adaptation
studies by Timothy Corrigan and Claire Monk.
I call for a more open-ended interpretation of history on film that
depends on setting aside preconceptions and approaching a narrative as a text
no more or less valuable than other forms of reconstruction: the “facts” that
supposedly characterize such texts are mostly ideologically positioned. For the purposes of this article I claim that
everyone – writers, historians, critics, audiences – should be empowered to
construct their own histories with their own understanding of what constitutes
“factual” or “non-factual” information from the evidence presented in front of
them and subsequently evaluate their conclusions through adaptation. An engagement with the past represents an
endless search for meaning, based on the Bergsonian notion that while our
bodies inhabit the present, our imaginations extend in all directions. The past helps us to reflect on ourselves; we
might not find the answers we are looking for, but our perspectives widen
through historical reflection.

By contrast
notions such as “reason” and “logic” are frequently ideologically positioned:
consider Wilson’s view of history as something that transcends Marxism and
Communism, both of which promote “The taking-over by the state of the means of
production and the dictatorship in the interests of the proletariat,” that
“never guarantee the happiness of anybody but the dictatorship themselves”
(483). The best way to achieve happiness
is through “the light of one’s imagination and with the help of one’s common
sense [….] To accomplish such a task will require an unsleeping adaptive
exercise of reason and instinct combined” (484). In response we might ask what Wilson
understands by reasonable adaptive practice, especially in societies dominated
by ruling oligarchies? James Baldwin
offered a rather jaundiced answer to this question in a polemical open letter
dated 19 November 1970:

The American triumph – in which the American tragedy
has always been implicit – was to make Black people despise themselves [….] The
will of the people, in America, has always been […] sacred, and sacredly
cultivated: the better to be used by a carnivorous economy […] But most white
Americans dare not admit this […] and this fact contains mortal danger for the
Blacks and tragedy for the nation (Baldwin).

On this view history has been identified with
whiteness, with the dominant majority perceived as solely capable of making
decisions in the public interest. While
circumstances have considerably changed since then, it seems that ideological
positions remain very similar except that the demonized other is now “the
Islamic world” and “the terrorist” rather than African Americans. Ahmed cites the example of the 2011
historical drama Cowboys and Aliens,
ostensibly set in the Old West of the late nineteenth century, where a group of
Americans are attacked without provocation by aliens who use unknown methods to
capture humankind and torture them without provocation (5). The binarist narrative is here updated to
fuel fears of global Islamification.
Apparently evolutionary change has been more sluggish than we might like
to assume: Arthur Koestler’s observations, written the year after Wilson’s,
still ring true today: “Man is sluggish and had to be led […] he has to be
driven through the desert […] by imaginary terrors and imaginary consolations
[….] We know that virtue does not matter to history, and that crimes remain
unpunished” (99). I suggest that binary
oppositions represent one of those “imaginary terrors” that have a powerful
effect on the way we view the past through the present, while actively
preventing us from psychological adaptation.

We not only
need to rethink the ideological purpose of binary oppositions, but to consider
afresh one of the strategies that continue to dominate film and adaptation studies
– genre theory, an issue recently addressed by Timothy Corrigan in the second
edition of Film and Literature: An
Introduction and Reader (2012). In
the introduction he shows how genre thinking was reshaped by the advent of
film’s potential to “supplement or replace” established literary forms and
thereby “expand or alter the older social values associated with literature”
(21). New film-specific genres emerged
such as the backstage musical, attesting to “the highly creative blend of two
regularly contending forces in film history – one emphasizing the external
conflictual forces associated with traditional drama and the other exploring
character psychology in which internal forces drive a narrative forward”
(23-4). On this view genre theory becomes
a flexible model that readily accommodates technological as well as creative
advances, while readily embracing contradiction – it is possible, for instance,
to see character psychology integrating seamlessly with incident-driven
narratives in a melodrama. Yet
Corrigan’s position seems to have shifted by the end of the volume, when in a
formulation pitched at newcomers to adaptation studies, he characterizes genres
as mechanisms participating in “recognizable conventions and formulas that seem
to transcend individual literary or cinematic examples of that genre; on the
other hand, genres continually evolve in terms of specific historical periods
and practices” (432). Corrigan refers to
conventions being “recognizable,” but recognizable to whom? And is it always true that genre divisions
transcend individual literary and cinematic productions? Would epoch-making historical adaptations
such as Citizen Kane (1941), or more
recently Inglorious Basterds (2009)
fit that framework? Do such works
deliberately position themselves outside the constraints of genre
classification or reshape them? And what
about our responses to a genre film; do we simply depend on previously acquired
knowledge, or do we develop the creative potential to respond in new and
suggestive ways? Isn’t the tension
between past understanding and present reinterpretation of genres the means to
produce new knowledge for the future?

Such
questions might seem pedantic – especially if we are interested in looking at the
ways in which film approaches history in a general sense; but there is still a
serious point to make about genre theory’s capacity to limit as well as promote
pluralist interpretations of the past. Citizen Kane is not only a criticism of
a notorious newspaper baron’s megalomania, but it provides fascinating insight
into the twenty-five-year-old director’s best and worst character traits both
in front of and behind the camera.[2] Moreover we must not overlook the film’s
transhistorical appeal; a young Donald Trump discussed it as one of his most
life-enhancing favorites on post released on YouTube in 2008 (“Donald Trump on Citizen Kane”).[3] Welles’s film continues to offer salutary
lessons on the limitations as well as the benefits of megalomania.

Perhaps
paradoxically, genre theory can also limit pluralist responses, even though
researchers try their best to avoid such pitfalls. Claire Monk’s recently published qualitative
and quantitative research into the preferences of heritage films in the United
Kingdom demonstrates their appeal to a variety of filmgoers including
middle-aged females and gay males (35).
Some of her respondents enjoy the feminist content; others find the
texts “expressly anti-feminist”; while a few did not interpret them in terms of
gender and sexuality (35). While Monk’s
research reveals an encouraging diversity of response, her conclusions have been
circumscribed by her initial choice of films for the respondents to look at, thereby
giving her the ultimate power to determine the limits of the heritage film
genre. Such powers underpinning most
academic endeavors were described by Michel Foucault in 1972-73 as “adaptive
controls as on the new nationalities of power, new human sciences [….] [that] anatomize
modern power together with the human sciences and modern forms that render it
possible” (qtd. in Garland 4). I would
suggest that establishing the limits of genre classification represents one of
those “adaptive controls” and thereby prioritize certain interpretations over
others.

In the late 1970s I took an
introductory course in historiography at high school, based on E. H. Carr’s What is History (1961), where we
reflected critically on the status of facts as a component part of historical
narratives. Just because a given
historian claimed that their research might be more “truthful” than that of
their rivals did not mean that they had access to privileged information. Carr’s point was exuberantly vindicated in
1983 when the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper pronounced that a series of sixty
volumes of journals purportedly written by Adolf Hitler were indeed the genuine
article; further forensic examination proved the claim to be false. This salutary lesson told us a lot about the
ways in which historians – especially those of high status – like to position
themselves in contemporary cultures as authority-figures, issuing adaptive
controls in the Foucauldian sense on their readers’ interpretive
potential. One such control is the need
for “objectivity” in history-writing, insulated from skepticisms beyond the
empirical and incapable of entertaining any notions of responsible relativism
or ethical intrusion. The historian
accepts the reality of the absent past and yet still claims they know it for
what it was – not just then, but now, today, still talking to us. This form of transhistoricism tells us a lot
about the way historians are viewed in contemporary cultures as somehow
privileged, with access to the kind of information denied to other narrative-writers. Alun Munslow likens many historians from a
variety of fields to “herd animals” remaining determined to defend their
epistemic beliefs against “a dangerous moral relativism that must entail the
denial of facts and their ethical message” (107).

Perhaps the herd instinct also influences
filmmakers and critics trying to talk about the ways in which history is
transformed into cinematic form. At the
beginning of this piece I invoked Sinan Akıllı’s claim that David Lean is far
more even-handed in his interpretation of T. E. Lawrence than mine; taking
Munslow’s comments into account, I would argue that such issues are
fundamentally insignificant. What
matters more is to look at the means by which screenwriter Robert Bolt (from an
initial script by Michael Wilson) selected a series of adaptive controls to
render Lawrence acceptable to Anglo-American audiences by drawing heavily on Seven Pillars of Wisdom – whose
authenticity as an historical record has been repeatedly subject to question
since its first appearance in 1922.[4] By choosing to cast the blond-haired,
blue-eyed Peter O’Toole in the leading role, Lean increases that sense of
control (Noël Coward famously remarked after the film’s London premiere in
1962: “If you [O’Toole] had been prettier, the film would have been called
‘Florence of Arabia’” (qtd. in Lyttelton)).

By
advocating this approach to historical adaptation, I place myself squarely
among that group of scholars accused by right-wing journalist Paul Johnson of
making “the flight of reason” – abandoning collective definitions of what
represents “good” and “bad” history and dedicating myself instead to personal
reminiscence, thereby “throw[ing] off some of the constraints” that should
shape judgement (321). On this view,
issues such as genre classification or factual accuracy are the main
determinants of what constitutes “good” adaptation. Johnson is particularly hard on polemicists
such as Noam Chomsky, whom he believes have abandoned their field of expertise
in favor of making arrogant claims that “their special knowledge gives them
valuable insights” into contemporary life (329). Such moves render intellectuals potentially
threatening rather than beneficial to society’s future: “Not only should they
be kept away from the levers of power [….] people matter more than concepts and
must come first” (342).[5] I am neither close to the “levers of power”
nor ever likely to be; but I believe that adapting history has to lose its
preoccupation with truth and objectivity and acknowledge its status as an
art-form that asserts, argues, represents and suggests from an authorial as
well as a film-going standpoint (Munslow 108).
We need to acknowledge our intellectual sluggishness in accepting
mainstream binary oppositions and/or generic classifications that reinforce
rather than challenge existing ideological orthodoxies, a maneuver described
most recently by Sarah Wise as willfully “history-blind,” that substitutes
“phoney, generic versions” of historical questions that demand urgent renegotiation
(30).[6] The task facing us is not to identify facile connections
between past significance and present meaning – that we might term “relevance”
– but to investigate how history enables us to rediscover who we are, where we
are, what we have done wrong and what we have got right, and hopefully draw on
such experiences that can reformulate our narratives for the future.[7] What we see on screen can trigger powerful
revaluations of individual subject positions (Manguel 9).

Let me
return to Lawrence of Arabia once
more to elaborate my point. As it stands
Lean, Bolt and Wilson’s completed film offers a vision of the past based on at
least three complex historical narratives: Seven
Pillars of Wisdom, Wilson’s and Bolt’s screenplay treatments, and Lean’s
casting decisions based on the production requirements of making an epic in the
early Sixties. The adaptation studies
specialist has to sift through these narratives and reflect on how they were
brought together into the finished product through a process of collaboration
between different creative workers. Our
knowledge of binary oppositions and generic classifications assumes a
peripheral role; we should concern ourselves with the process of evolution from
storyboarding through rehearsal to filming and distribution. We need to consider a multiplicity of layers that are essential to our
understanding of historical adaptation.

Yet it not
only production histories we need to acknowledge; we also need to reflect on
our own responses to the films as well. I
first saw the restored version of Lawrence
(re-released in the United States in 1989) as recently as 1991, in the first showing
in the Republic of Turkey, after a twenty-nine-year ban due to its alleged
anti-Turkish content. Watching the film
in a dilapidated downtown theater was a fascinating experience, especially when
Jose Ferrer appeared to be enjoying the experience of torturing Lawrence so
much; how would a socially diverse local audience of families, learners, and buffs
react to it? Nothing actually happened;
the audience applauded at the end of the 216-minute epic, including the
overture, intermission, and exit music, and congratulated the local
distributors. The experience made me
realize just how local politics had shifted over three decades: the film was
now treated as a western classic, the product of Cold War attitudes destroyed
by the recent collapse of the Soviet Union.
That night inspired me; I had only been working in the Republic for a
year or so, and was still unsure of my role as an educator. Perhaps my future work in teaching
literatures of all cultures could bridge the cultural divide between “East” and
“West” that still affected western-Turkish relations at that time.

Looking
back now, I realize that such assumptions might have been essentialist, but the
experience of watching the film inspired critical reflection on the relationship
between adapting history and my professional future. I had to sift evaluate different forms of
evidence to forge an interpretation, lifting open the secret chambers of the
past in a fashion similar to what Virginia Woolf once described as discovering
“tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out would
teach everyone everything but [are] never offered openly, never made public”
(qtd. in Gomes 56). The impossibility of objectivity assured that the truths
would never be made apparent to me, but at least I had acquired new insight.

Another
example might illustrate the point further.
Although I was a regular filmgoer during my teenage years, I tended to
go with friends and/or parents, where we would make an evening of it, so to
speak, watching double bills at the local theater. I never ventured into an arthouse cinema
until I left school, when I visited the Curzon Cinema in Mayfair in 1979 to see
James Ivory’s The Europeans, based on
the novella first published in 1878. I
knew little or nothing about Henry James, but had seen Lee Remick on television
in Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill
(1974) and remembered her stellar performance.
I remember being captivated by the way in which Ivory, Remick and the
cast recreated a New England bourgeois society focused on outward show at the
expense of their emotions. I could
readily empathize with their mental struggles, having spent much of my school years
being actively told to repress my feelings, thereby upholding a long-held
tradition – typical of boys’ private schools at that time – that to do
otherwise was somehow “unmanly.” I knew
nothing about textual fidelity, genre issues nor historical accuracy (having
spent my time studying nineteenth century British, not American history); but
the film’s social exposé of late Victorian conventions, that still existed over
century later, cast a visceral appeal that told myself something about myself
and how nine years of education had shaped (or warped?) my personality. The experience of watching The Europeans gave rise to a lifelong
preoccupation with the often tempestuous relationship between private and
public selves in Henry James’s work that continues to this day.

Such
encounters have helped me formulate a view of historical adaptation that moves
outwards from the individual to the community – not just encompassing creative
workers involved in the process of making historical films (or any other form
of historical narrative) but accommodating filmgoers as well. Our understanding of such texts evolves
continually out of this interaction between such individuals. For further evidence, I turn to an inspiring
piece written in 2010 by screenwriter and educator Diane Lake about working
with groups of learners on writing historical screenplays: one observed in her end-of-semester
evaluation was that she was “not sure what I was actually expecting out of this
class. I had always wanted to write my
own things, or write for an existing show, but I definitely learned the value
of – and how hard it can be to write successful – adaptations” (92). Such comments offer some fascinating perspectives
on how we adapt to history. I remember
feeling much the same as this learner did when I took the historiographical
course at high school for the first time: why was I being told to question
objectivity, when hitherto I had been taught that it was the basic component of
all historical narratives? I always
wanted to write my own history – not necessarily for publication – but to make
sense of my own life; but school life had always dissuaded me from doing
so. Revealing one’s personal feelings
might lead to accusations of weakness. The
experiences of watching The Europeans
and Lawrence inspired me to do so,
even though I realized (and continue to do so) that my cinematic impressions of
both films would alter throughout my life.

The
complexities of such personal – as well as private – engagements with texts,
whether cinematic or otherwise, make me understand just how difficult the
process can be of representing history on film, especially in a collaborative
medium where workers discuss “ideas about what they’d like to write, the worlds
they’d like to create, and the people they’d like to bring to life on the page”
(Lake 92). Despite the practical
difficulties involved – most notably in collecting reminiscences from filmgoers
past and present, unless we actively embrace ethnographic approaches - I
believe that adaptation studies has a theoretical duty to widen its
methodological focus and rescue history from the possession of those embracing
“reasonable” issues of historical accuracy and/or genre theory, and embrace
more people-centered strategies valuing difference and individuality. Jennifer Howard’s comments are apposite:
“Such comfort [provided by the historical narrative] is fleeting: that is the
order of things [….] maybe the past will return in some gentler form, weathered
and wiser and gentler now, and ready to take us back” (“Sharing Links,”
24). Memories of our cinema-going histories,
as well as our present tastes can help us determine our future lives. This kind of autobiography-centered approach
has more in common with fan studies rather than adaptation studies, but I would
contend that it is a valuable means to renegotiate our futures and our means of
coming to terms with increasingly complex situations.

Based on
the abstract I originally offered, I see that this paper has been placed in a
section entitled “Transcultural Adaptations,” implying that there might be
something different about the processes of adapting texts across cultures,
rather than across media within the same territory. Perhaps “transculturality” signifies
something peripheral in comparison to “mainstream” Anglo-American processes of
adaptation. But perhaps I am just being
mischievous: the process of transmission of historical material, across
geographical, mediatic, disciplinary or any other boundaries is inherently
enriching, an issue addressed as long ago as 1911 by Henri Bergson:

My memory is there, which conveys something of the
past into the present. My mental state,
as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration
which it accumulates; it goes on increasing-rolling upon itself, as a snowball
in the snow [….] This amounts to saying that there is no essential difference
between passing from one state to another and persisting in the same
state. If the state which ‘remains the
same’ is more varied than we think, on the one hand the passing from one state
to another resembles, more than we imagine, a single state being prolonged; the
transition is continuous (1-2).

Life is here viewed as “a
gentle slope,” not divided into identifiable categories of past, present, and
future, but part of a continually moving zone “which comprises all we feel and
think or will-all, in short, that we are at any given moment. It is this entire zone which in reality makes
up our state. Now, states thus defined
cannot be regarded as distinct elements.
They continue each other in an endless flow” (3). Bergson’s thesis expresses the potential of
adapting history, where we have the unaccustomed freedom to evolve and recreate
narratives based on an “endless flow” of impressions and subsequently assess
them through interaction with those around us.
Some try to deride this apparently “free-for-all” view of human
psychology that sets aside questions of accuracy and truth and instead works
towards creating “a blurry, unstable kind of narrative in which the details of
everyday life become the fabric of fictionality, and real life begins to
resemble an intricate weave of stories.
Theory meets fiction, autobiography meets criticism – and just about
anything goes” (Elkin 25). As Alun
Munslow so trenchantly suggests, however, any historical narrative purporting
to communicate “the truth” is inevitably culturally constructed. I recently read an article on Nuri
Gencossian’s translation of The Wisdom of
the Prophets into Turkish (1952), where the author insisted on
invisibility, based on the belief that he was not creating an original work of
art but transmitting divine sources of knowledge directly to his readers. Truth, or the real knowledge, was spiritual
knowledge/ skill (marifet), originating
directly from God through an angel, and only accessible to readers after a
lengthy mystical apprenticeship. Hence
Gencossian’s readers had to become acclimatized to the mechanisms of this form
of historical adaptation before appreciating it (Akbatur 64-5). The topic of genre is another culturally fruitful
area of adaptation research and its relationship to history: Gönül Dönmez-Colin
highlights the vogue for melodrama during the earliest years of Turkish cinema
from the Fifties to the late Seventies that provided numerous forms of
catharsis for filmgoers, especially during times of extreme socio-political struggle
(for example, during the crises of 1960, 1971, and 1980). The happy endings, with virtue rewarded and
vice punished, offered visions of social stability that instilled a sense of
well-being into mass audiences. After
the 2000s more nationalistic films became extremely popular, with the focus of
attention on issues such as the conflict in the East, the place of religion and
secularism in the state, and the contested question of plural/ single identities
– as witnessed, for instance, in the megahit Fetih 1453 (Conquest 1453)
(2012) that retold the story of Turkish triumphs in Constantinople for modern
filmgoers (148-9).[8] Comparing such historical adaptations with
equivalent epics produced in the Anglo-American context (especially Ridley
Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005) that
focuses on similar material) can tell us a lot about different forms of
constructed knowledge and how we respond to them. Can we really believe that a society can
embrace “pluralism” or “multiculturalism” as we might understand it in the
West, when it has disseminated an ideological message of a monocultural Turkish
identity since its creation nearly eighty years ago? This is neither the time nor the place to
analyze this question in any detail, but the fact that it relates explicitly to
my day-to-day encounters of living in another country, and my interactions with
family, friends and learners, emphasizes the importance of learning how to
think critically as well as spiritually about the processes of adapting history
and what its purposes might be for my future life.

I would
like to end with a final reminiscence. Following
a recent research visit to the University of Swansea, I picked up a copy of
Vernon Watkins’s essays on Dylan Thomas
and other Poets’ Poetry. I had
always liked listening to Thomas’s work on disc or on radio, as the sound of
words always seemed to exert more emotional and psychological appeal than the
sense. I felt myself transported into a
pure world of the imagination, where my mind could range across boundaries
unfettered by daily concerns – and thereby work to establish an unspoken
communication between past, present and future experiences. One of Watkins’s comments on the
poetry-making process as applied both to Thomas and himself particularly struck
me: “The response to the Past and the thrust of the Present act upon each other
so intricately that the moment cannot be foreseen when the two are reconciled
and bewilderment gives place to order.
That is why it seems to me that all generalisations […] are meaningless
[….] All life is lived forward in time, and it sometimes seems to me that a
poet is a person who has been made aware of the timeless, and recurrently
recognizes it at unexpected moments” (166).
I would not claim to be a poet, even in embryo, but I would like to
underline the basic purpose of adapting history – whether on film or elsewhere
- as a willingness to acknowledge the timeless, based on the belief that
distinctions between “literature,” “poetry” and “history” are as arbitrary as
those separating past, present and future.
They all represent forms of knowledge designed to broaden our awareness,
refine our life-narratives and subsequently help us make sense of our
lives. If we realize the importance of
this process, and thereby place ourselves at the center of that
adaptation-making process, then we can come to greater self-understanding.[9]

Gülçur, Ala Sivaş.
“Historical Epic as a Genre in Popular Turkish Cinema.” The
Handbook of Research on the Impact of Culture and Society on the Environment
Industry. Ed. R. Gülay Öztürk. 264-77.
Hershey, PA: IGI Global International, 2014. E-book.

Wilson, Edmund.
To the Finland Station: A Study in
the Writing and Acting of History.
1940. New York: Doubleday,
1953. Print.

Wise, Sarah. “Treading
Gingerly.” TLS 31 July 2015: 30. Print.

[1]
According to the National Library of Turkey (Milli Kütüphane), the first translation did not appear until 2014.

[2]
Critic David Thomson makes an apt summary: “Citizen
Kane – was a collection of all the new ways of making film, but it was a
celebration of the old ways, too. It was brilliant, yet it could not resist
lampooning Hearst (a jab that ruined its chance of success)” (“Orson Welles:
The Most Glorious”).

[3]
The relationship between Trump and Citizen Kane was discussed more recently by
Marina Hyde (“What Citizen Trump Can’t Stand”).

[4]
Only recently Dr. Neil Faulkner, a member of the Bristol University Great Arab
Revolt Project, claimed that “Lawrence has something of a reputation as a
teller of tall tales” (“Bullet Supports,” 44).

[5]
By a quirk of fate (or is it irony), this is precisely what Chomsky claims, as
he shows in his most recent book how the Fourteenth Amendment to the
Constitution has been abused by US Corporations, “established and sustained by
state power,” who have assumed full rights to persons of flesh and blood – in
fact, far greater rights, thanks to their scale, their immortality, and the
protections of limited liability” (93).

[6] This mode of interpretation was
equally popular two and a half centuries ago.
Norma Clarke notes the tendency of Gothic novelists such as Ann
Radcliffe to employ “sentimental fiction” to fill historical gaps, based on
established binaries of good vs. evil, hero vs. villain, and so on (“Wonder
Women,” 10).

[7] In using the terms “past
significance” and “present meaning,” I am reminded of the article written as
long ago as 1969 by Robert Weimann, claiming that the two concepts engage in a
relationship which, in its interdependence, may illuminate either. The dialectic nature of that relationship
means that the deeper and richer understanding of a text’s genesis is, the more
likely it will be that the achievement of a comprehensive re-evaluation will
emerge in the present. The only snag
with that definition is one of terminology: how do we know when we have
achieved a “deeper and richer understanding?” In a notorious modern-dress
revival of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair
at the Aldwych Theatre, London, in 1969, director Terry Hands claimed that his
updated production of a Jacobean play had been founded on careful research and
a careful scrutiny of the text in an attempt to show the need to establish a
Republican Jonson Theatre in opposition to the Royal Shakespeare Company. The production was a disaster (Crosser, “Bartholomew Fair: Stage History”),
thereby proving the elusiveness of Weimann’s use of terminology.

[8] For more on genre reconstruction
in Turkish cinema, see Ala Sivaş Gülçur, “Historical Epic as a Genre in Popular
Turkish Cinema” (264-77).

[9]
Watkins has this point to make about the power of pure sound: “The true theatre
is the mind’s eye, and the true action of the theatre springs from solitude and
darkness [….] art is interesting, too, and art does not need cameras” (“In
Defence,” 247).